Vehicles operating in an autonomous mode (e.g., driverless) can relieve occupants, especially the driver, from some driving-related responsibilities. When operating in an autonomous mode, the vehicle can navigate to various locations using onboard sensors, allowing the vehicle to travel with minimal human interaction or in some cases without any passengers.
Motion planning and control are critical operations in autonomous driving. For example, throttle, brake, and steering commands are important commands in autonomous driving. While Model Predictive Control (MPC) has been widely studied for high performance, high precision robotic controls, such has been seldomly used (if at all) for autonomous driving vehicles (ADVs). This is largely due to the excessive computational power requirement to implement an MPC model, and the instability of the MPC model when controlling the ADV in extreme conditions (e.g., large curve, high speed, sharp turn, etc.).